Yeah, a kayak!

I dragged the skin-covered frame out from under the twin plyboards Jumbo slept on. There was barely room for it in the space between bed and bookcase. I had to turn it longways and straddle it. It hadn’t slid all that easily either, probably because Jumbo’d loaded it with stuff through its central manhole. Dustbunnies furred its sides.

The first thing I found in the cockpit was the mat he’d hung as a curtain until my angry fit in LaGrange. He’d folded it five or six times and stuffed it down into the manhole as a plug. I pulled it out and looked under it. There sat a loose bag of animal hides, tied at the neck with cords of sinew and knotted with little ivory beads. It smelled fusty-funny, in a way I can’t describe.

No matter how I resisted, that bag felt like a dare, a dare to look inside it. Pulling a kayak out from under a bed hadn’t struck me as prying, but removing that folded mat had inched me towards a bad self-feeling, and the bag posed an even harder test of my honor. I’d stooped, so to speak, to snoopery, and Mama hadn’t raised me to pry. But Jumbo needed unlocking worse than his bag did; maybe untying it would open him too.

Inside the bag, I found a journal bound in split and marbled leather, with a bundle of ribbon-tied letters between its last page and its back cover. The letter sheaf had the bulk of a small book. I studied it closely, but didn’t unknot the ribbon. The paper felt brittle, crisp as fallen leaves-I feared I might crumble some pages. At last, I withdrew the top letter, eased it from its envelope, and unfolded the first of four or five thin pages.

The handwriting-with all its squiggles, smudges, and such-was in English, not some unspeakable foreign lingo. The first letter, addressed to an English woman, was dated “December 11th, 1798.” It said, “You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.” It took a minute to decipher that sentence, but once I’d figured it out, I read it again and went on to the rest.

The writer was a young “naval adventurer,” the captain of an English merchant ship sailing from a Russian port towards the North Pole. The man called himself Robert Walton, and he stupidly reckoned the polar cap a “country of eternal light,” despite the ice plains his ship would have to navigate to reach it. The English woman he wrote was his sister, Mrs Saville. In his fourth letter, which turned into a log of shipboard events, he said he and his men had seen a “sledge” on the ice. A manlike giant had mushed his dog team beyond them, out of telescope range. “This appearance,” Walton wrote his sister, “excited our unqualified wonder.” I guess so.

Anyway, his mention of a giant made me think Jumbo’d hidden the letters because they reported on his ancestors. I figured Walton had seen an early forebear of Jumbo’s on the sled, maybe Great-great-grandfather Clerval.

After four of Walton’s letters, I reached the opening of the life story of a fevered European rescued from the ice by Walton’s sailors. Walton had acted as this man’s secretary, writing down all he said, so even though you got the guy’s whole personal history, you got it in Walton’s handwriting. “I am by birth a Genevese,” the man told him, “and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” Of course, I didn’t care rip about his la-di-da family.

So I refolded the letters and tied them up again with a ribbon such as could’ve decorated a ball gown for Napoleon’s Josephine. I was about to jam this sheaf into the journal or log that’d held them, and to stuff the log back into the funny skin bag, and the funny skin bag back into the kayak-when a powerful urge to check out the log overcame me and I thumbed it open at the beginning:

Here I commence a new life. In the wretchedness of the candle-end of my former existence, I hoped only to die. So far into the maw of ruthlessness and depravity had I fallen, albeit at the heartless prodding of my maker, that I now despised myself as the world did. I ached for death, for the surcease of unappealable extinction, and hopefully I commended my spirit to that bleak demesne.

Of a sudden, after who knows how long or wherefore my unwelcome reprieve, I breathe again. My damaged heart thumps in the cave of my chest. My frozen limbs stir. My eyes, moments ago eclipsed by a primordial dark, lift into focus the Arctic stars and the sapphirine ice of a world that yesterday, or centuries past, I all too gladly fled and foreswore. Today, like Christendom’s fabled Son of Man, I am resurrected.

This entry had no date, but it looked-old. It sounded old too. Reading it over, I could hear Jumbo speaking. So I also imagined him, once upon a time, writing them in a fancy hand-in English. He’d shaped his words a lot like Walton’s, almost like he’d used Walton’s for a model.

I carried Jumbo’s log to the school desk at the head of my new bed, where I started copying Jumbo’s story into my bigger notebook. It seemed important to do this-the most important thing I could do to keep Jumbo whole in my mind while I cut him open and laid him out like a lab frog in my crabbed copybook hand:

In homage to the merchant captain who set down in its entirety the story of my tormented maker, I indite in English this account of my final days as his creature. Of my new life subsequent to a perplexing resuscitation I also write. English leaps as readily to my brain, and thence to my hand, as does French. Did my brain once belong to a native of Albion? Whatever the case, I commence my new life with the fresh mental perspective afforded by the tongue of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton.

What I now recollect of my old life is that after fleeing the ship on which had died the author at once of my being and its wretchedness, I could not steel myself to follow Frankenstein into the all-consuming abyss. Nay, I could not slay that which he had animated. Although I had promised Walton, in our unplanned meeting over my father’s corpse, that I would annihilate myself in flames, I temporized. I discovered excuses to sustain my body, that great puppet of patchwork flesh that hauled about the ice my anguish-freighted soul; and with my body, my consciousness.

As I delayed, the weather grew ever more vicious and storm-racked. The northern lights faded behind a veil of tattered and then granitic clouds, from which snow whirled in turbulent blizzards and beneath which the oceans turned to entrapping rock. Walton and his crew could not break their vessel from this white prison, nor did the storms or cold relent to hearten, with even a feeble glimmering of escape, these unhappy men. By mid-October, all aboard the Caliban, Walton’s ship, had perished, frozen, starved, or been slain; previously, however, the captain had bent himself to copying every single word of every unsent letter to his sister, as if this obsessive activity would both warm his bones and free the fast-held Caliban from the ice.

During the winter onslaught, I huddled with my sledge against the elements. I gathered about me my dogs. Around us, I erected a crude but fanciful fortification of ice. Inside the eye-stabbing brightness of this shelter, a dome on the groaning floes, I watched with pitiless interest the decline of my dogs, so cruelly deranged in their discomfort and hunger. They snarled at and bit one another, gnashing their teeth in fury, so that to prevent a massacre among them, I throttled the instigators, as I had throttled the foremost loved ones of my creator.

Even with their insulating fur, the dogs withstood the Arctic cold less well than I, for the howling of the gales invigorated me. Indeed, the continuous whipping of snow and pelletlike surface ice across that desert served only to confirm in me my decision to live.