Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (4 page)

Among Their Bright Eyes
Alaya Dawn Johnson

“What I ask of you is reasonable and moderate; I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself . . . neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast wilds of South America . . . My companion will be of the same nature as myself and will be content with the same . . . ”

—The monster,
Frankenstein

He doesn’t understand what it’s like, to hover at their edges without a light while he spends each dead day within shining distance of their eyes. I’ve seen my eyes in still pools after the rain. They have two different colors, blue and brown, but they’re mismatched and they never shine. Even if I bring a fire right by my face, even if lightning strikes a few feet away, they never shine.

I wish that I could stop. I wish I could close my dull eyes and imagine them shining someplace else—someplace where my body is whole and he is gone forever. But instead I squat here by the river, looking through the trees as they sit by their fire, talking and laughing and eating and spraying light with the whites of their eyes.

He told me that we cannot die.

“Do you see that lightning?” he said, pointing with a finger a different color than the rest of his hand to distant storm clouds. “It senses our presence. It will come here, and strike us, and we will gain its energy.”

“What if it doesn’t strike us?” I asked.

“Eventually, we’ll stop. It’s the closest we’ll ever get to death.”

And I, who still didn’t know that eyes could shine, hoped I would always find the lightning.

They worship him. Or, perhaps more accurately, they are afraid of him. They keep him in one of their shelters, where he sits rigidly day after day, surrounded by the tiny, shriveled heads of their enemies. His dull, open eyes—two different shades of brown—stare at nothing. His stolen lungs do not breathe, his pilfered heart does not pound. Yet his crudely stitched patchwork skin does not rot any further—the monster has stopped, but he is not dead.

I despise him for being so pityingly self-assured, so brave. He descended to the darkness, but I still chased the lightning, wishing I could stop even while that surreal light coursed through my body. He says that Christians are supposed to love their creator, but how could I love mine? I am an abomination, a wild assembly of wasted, fetid things—a whore of borrowed parts. How could I want this life? And yet, how can I end it?

I walk along the edge of the river towards the far end of their village, sneaking carefully behind the trees so they do not see me. I like invisibility, because I imagine it must be a little like death. I see the perfect, fist-sized trophy heads on their stakes before I actually see the hut. Each of the little men’s mouths are open, as though they are engaged in a perpetual, silent gasp. Some of them seem to be falling apart, with hair peeling off in ragged patches from the shrunken skull. I cannot help but feel a kinship with these sad trophies: are we not, after all, the same thing?

When I squat in the shadow of a nearby tree, I see that he is not alone. The strange girl is there again, bobbing her head as she rakes over the earthen floor and shoes away the bird-eating spiders. Her hair is much too long for someone her age, and she has strange tattoos on her stomach that she periodically strokes with a malformed left hand. I’ve seen her here for the past moon—her pleasant face has brilliant, bone-white eyes with irises like charred wood, but the other villagers never look at her when they speak. They always seem afraid, but I don’t know why.

A few minutes after I arrive, she pauses. Slowly, she uses her good hand to unravel her loincloth. Very deliberately, she sets it on the ground.

After shock, I feel an unexpected rush of warmth—even sympathy. Here, again, is a soul made of different parts. Below her ochre-stained breasts and her tattooed belly, I see what the loincloth has been hiding. The “woman” is neither woman nor man. Or, perhaps, both.

She turns and stares right at the tree I was sure hid my hideous form. “Will you . . . will you show yourself? Or do I offend you?” Her voice is very soft, but deeper than I expected.

My heart beats fast and irregular; my blood feels as though it is slowly leaking from my veins. I trace back to my very first memories—alone on a glacier with a half-frozen monster who had just realized that he couldn’t die.
When people see us,
he told me then as he cradled my head like a baby,
they hate us. We are too hideous to live, but we cannot die. Never let them see you. I will take care of you.

But he has abandoned me—his eyes are duller than those on the trophy heads beside him, and I have never longed for anything more than I suddenly long for this strange creature’s acceptance.

“You do not want to see me,” I say, slowly. The words feel foreign—this is the first time I have ever spoken their language, though I learned to understand it years ago. “You will hate me.”

She laughs softly. “I couldn’t. I’ve already shown you why. I know hate, but I could never feel it for you.”

My skin feels taut. I want to go to her, but dull terror holds me back. “You must promise,” I say, wishing my voice wouldn’t rasp in my throat. “Not to look . . . never look at my eyes.”

She seems surprised. Her hands still as she wraps the loincloth back around her waist. “Why?” she asks. “I only want to see you. Do you think your appearance would matter to me?”

“Just promise. Promise, or I’ll leave here and never return.” I never knew my voice could sound so threatening. I sound almost like him.

She glances down, but not before I see her surprise, her sudden wariness. “I promise,” she says. “I won’t look. Will you come out?”

I reach up to the tree above me and pull down one of its large leaves. I fasten the ends to my tangled, matted hair and pull it down so that it shades my eyes.

She takes a step back when I walk into the clearing. Her eyes rake my body—I stand there, exposed, as she takes in the crude stitches, the mismatched limbs, the filthy slaves’ tunic that I stole from them so I would not have to see my own naked body. But at least, I think as my temples pound with fear, she cannot see my eyes.

Is she disgusted? I cannot tell, but when she raises her eyes, I see the beautiful, bright things are smiling and I am relieved.

“We really are the same,” she says as she reaches out to touch the cleft of my rough chin. “I am called Kaapi. You?”

Already, she’s touched an old sorrow. “I’m called nothing,” I say.

“And the patchwork God?” she asks, gesturing to his rigid figure.

“They sometimes call him . . . monster.”

She articulates the foreign word slowly and then smiles. Her right hand ventures to my face again, caressing the rough scars on my cheekbone. It drifts up my face until it touches the edge of the leaf shading my eyes.

My hand darts out and grips her wrist. She lets out a gasp of surprise and for a few terrifying, exhilarating moments I revel in the frantic pounding of her blood that beats against my palm. The knowledge of how easily I could crack the fragile bones beneath her skin makes my breath come fast and hard. Is this, I wonder, what he feels when he kills?

The thought snaps me back to myself, and I let go of her. She grips her wrist, but not before I see the angry red imprint of my oversized hand.

I stumble backwards and then flee into the forest.

That night, shivering in my hole as the rain pounded on my back, I vowed to never go back. But today I find myself beside the same tree again, staring at Kaapi’s slow, meticulous movements as she cleans the shaman’s tools. I am lost in every part of her—her long hair, her deformed left hand, her hybrid parts. Her right wrist has a livid, purple bruise and she winces occasionally when she bends it.

I shift my weight to lean forward, and a twig snaps beneath me. She looks up.

“I hoped you would come back,” she says. “You’re the only one who doesn’t hate me.” She pauses for a few moments. “I saw . . . monster before he became like this,” she says. “He helped them attack my village. He had no axe, but he covered himself with blood. When it was over, they took me before they knew what I was . . . but it doesn’t matter. It’s no different here.” She pointed to one of the trophy heads and laughed. “That’s my cousin,” she said. “He and I would have been married had I been whole, but now he guards the god who killed him. You’re very different from monster, I think. When he killed, he looked . . . like there was joy in the death. You seem so much kinder.”

I can’t take my eyes off her wrist. I keep remembering how her blood felt beneath my palm, the abrupt exhilaration of my physical superiority, and the realization of just how sweet her death would feel by my hands.

“I am no different,” I whisper.

Two days later, I finally see her again. I don’t know where she has been, but her body is now covered with bruises and still bleeding cuts. She now no longer has even a ragged loincloth to cover herself. She huddles in a corner of the hut and sobs.

“Are you there?” she asks.

Before I can think better of it, I fasten another leaf to shade my eyes and approach her. She looks scared, but not of me. I wonder if she’s a fool. I kneel by her and she touches me tentatively with her left hand. Then she leans forward and kisses my mouth.

His lips never felt like this—they were hard and awkward, demanding something they could never give. Kaapi’s are tentative, but soft and so gentle I dare not touch her. She presses herself closer to me and we fall back. I taste her salt tears and blood mingling with the saliva in our mouths. The sudden taste of blood makes me grip her more convulsively, though I hate myself for it. She pulls up my tunic and I am unable to stop her.

The sight of her hair spilling across her face above me brings back an unfamiliar, hazy memory—Kaapi’s features momentarily blend with those of a blonde woman with dark green eyes. I don’t know her, but I recognize the flash as a shadow memory from the life of the man whose brain I now use.

Kaapi pauses. She must have noticed my expression. “Do you want to stop?” she asks.

Her hybrid part is warm and hard against my thigh. I shake my head.

It begins to rain, and in the distance I think I hear the beginning rumbles of thunder. I ignore them. Kaapi pounds into me, her expression intense. I imagine myself as a slab of meat, or a corpse with a million tiny ants skittering all over my body. Very soon, it is over. She pulls back out, curling herself against me. The thunder and its accompanying flashes of lightning seem to be coming closer, but I turn my head away.

Kaapi is still crying. “I want to die,” she whispers. “I just want to die.”

The lightning is dancing outside, begging me to come and find it, to be its slave once more, like I have been for all ten years of my life. I refuse to look.

“I do too,” I tell her. “Would you like . . . would you like to die together?”

She hugs me silently. The lightning, acknowledging its defeat, moves on.

I killed the boy who had the canoe. He seemed surprised to see me. I did not have to kill him, but I did. My chest is filled with many joys and many horrors—the memory of his small, scared face as he gasped for air above my reckless hands is both. Without the lightning, I can feel myself begin to slow. In a few days, I will stop. Kaapi said nothing about the boy, though I half wish she would. I wish she would condemn me, but she looks at me with nothing but devotion. She leans against me when I am not steering the boat, kissing my most repulsive parts, though she does not lift the leaf that shades my eyes.

“When do we reach the fall?” Kaapi asks.

“Two days, I think.”

She is silent for a while. “When we hit the rocks,” she says, “our souls will be free of our hideous bodies. We will walk in paradise together.”

He has told me we do not have souls, so I know her hopes are empty, but I still nod and pat her hand. Perhaps I will at least manage to achieve nothingness.

“I feel tired,” I say. “I will sleep for a while.”

I give her the pole to steer and lay down in the bottom of the boat.

My dreams are not my own. I see jumbled images of the green-eyed girl and the verdant bushes of a small cottage in a country I have never seen. The girl calls me Henry.

“He has your eyes, Henry,” she says, jiggling a laughing baby on her lap. “Just that exact shade of blue.” She tickles the baby’s fuzzy scalp and smiles.

I try to turn my head away from her, because the whites of her eyes are almost blinding me, but I can’t hide from the grief clawing up my throat.

The girl touches my arm, but her skin seems much darker. The world shudders, and I remember where I am.

“Are you okay?” Kaapi asks. I say nothing, instead choosing to watch her silently from under the shadow of the leaf. She leans in closer to me, and the moonlight reflects off of her eyes so brightly I can hardly see her irises. Instead, I see two reflected images of my own hideous face, mocking me in her bone-white brightness. I force myself still, struggling to control the anger that skitters beneath my skin.

“I am glad . . . to be dying with you,” she whispers.

And then, she lifts the leaf.

In that brief, naked moment I see the shock, the unwilling repulsion in her eyes. Unreasoning anger explodes from beneath my tingling skin. She falls back in the violently rocking canoe, but I lunge at her and grab her throat.

“I told you not to look!” I yell. “Why did you look?” Hot tears leak from my eyes onto her face.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t know . . . ”

“Didn’t know what?” She is going limp beneath my hands, but I cannot seem to stop myself. She has stopped struggling.

“You have his eyes,” she says, so softly I can barely hear her.

Abruptly, I let her go. She collapses on the bottom of the boat.

You have his eyes.

The dead eyes of a soulless god, whose only joy is death.

Kaapi awakes briefly, when we are minutes away from the falls. She doesn’t speak—but the roar of the water would make it impossible to hear her, anyway. I hold her head in my lap, rigidly keeping my eyes off of her ruined neck. She can’t seem to move her legs or arms, or even feel when I touch them.