This Monstrous Thing(4)
A group got on at the clock tower station, and I had to slide into the corner to make room. I nearly dropped Frankenstein in the shuffle, and as the pages fanned, a thin envelope slid from between them. I snatched it from the air before it fell.
There was my name again on the front in Mary’s looped handwriting. I stared at it for a long moment as the omnibus jerked forward, and I tried not to let all that stupid hope inside me fill in what it might say. As angry as I was at her after the way we had ended, it thrilled me to think that maybe, at long last, she wanted to make things right between us. All she needed was to say the word, and I would have been hers in an instant.
I started to break the seal, but then a harsh voice from down the car growled, “Get up, you piece of machinery.”
I froze. A police officer was standing a few feet down the car, navy greatcoat sweeping all the way to the floor like a shroud, and I’d been so busy mooning like an idiot over Mary’s letter I hadn’t noticed him get on. I knew him at once—Inspector Jiroux, head of Geneva’s police force—by the heavy gold cross he kept on a chain through the buttonhole of his waistcoat. It flashed as he crossed his arms, glaring down at an old man with a shock of white hair and a brass button in the shape of a cog pinned to his coat collar. I shoved Mary’s letter back between the pages of Frankenstein and started to shoulder my way to the door, my heart stuttering.
Jiroux kicked the old man’s leg. There was a low metallic clang. “Get up,” he said again. “Don’t you see all these whole human men standing up around you?” He turned suddenly and pointed his baton at me. The old man and I both flinched. “Give this young man your seat.”
“It’s all right,” I mumbled, eyes on my boots.
“No it isn’t,” Jiroux said. “It’s not all right for men like you to be second to mechanicals like him.”
“He’s fine, really,” I said.
“He’s not fine, he’s a machine.” Jiroux seized the knee of the old man’s trousers and tugged it up, revealing the metal skeleton and mess of gears sinking into scar tissue beneath. “Not even a man anymore,” Jiroux said, and nudged the bars with the toe of his boot. They clattered softly.
The old man’s shoulders slumped. “Please, I can’t stand well. I lost it in the war.”
“And so you chose to spit in the face of God by letting a man make you mechanical?”
“It is not disrespect for God, sir—” the old man began, but Jiroux interrupted him, voice carrying through the cab like a priest from the pulpit.
“The form of man, as designed by God’s hand, is perfect. If God had wanted men made from metal, we would have been born as such. With the decision to install a mechanical piece, you have made yourself an offense against Him and His divine creation, and you forfeit the God-given rights of a human man.” He seized the old man by the collar and dragged him out of his seat. “Sit down,” he barked at me. I didn’t move. Everyone in the car was watching us. “Sit,” Jiroux said again as the omnibus began to slow.
“I’m getting off,” I said.
Jiroux glared at me, then shoved the old man, who tripped, barely stopping his fall on the edge of a woman’s seat. She jerked away from him like he had a catching disease. The doors to the omnibus flew open, and I stumbled down the stairs and out onto the pavement. It was two stops earlier than I’d meant to get off, but it still took the whole walk to the city’s edge to convince my heart to slow again.
The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that followed had left people across Europe with missing and damaged limbs and, in turn, more people than ever wanting clockwork parts to replace the ones they’d lost. Lots of the political expatriates from France had come down to Switzerland, and Geneva had become a haven for them, a city that boasted neutrality and sanctuary for war refugees. The veterans were a new set of clients for our shop, though we still saw the sorts of injuries we’d treated before we came to Geneva: limbs ripped up and ruined by factory work, arthritic joints, and club feet to be replaced with moving metal pieces, twisted spines swapped out with metal vertebrae. We’d grafted a set of steam-powered pistons to the hips of a man paralyzed from the waist down so he could walk again.
My father liked to say that prejudice didn’t have to make sense, but I’d still never worked out how anyone could think what we did was wicked. People like Jiroux thought that as soon as metal was fused to bone and muscle it took something fundamental and human away, and that men and women with mechanical parts were machines, somehow less than the rest of us.
The clockwork men either lived broken, or hated. It was a shitty choice.
Through the checkpoint and beyond the city walls, the foothills stretched like open palms raised toward the sinking sun. I left the road and started upward along the vineyard roads that turned into narrow mountain paths, mud sucking at my boots as I climbed. Around me, the cliffs were silent, their stillness broken only by the somber wailing of the winter wind through the pines and the far-off industrial hum of the city, growing fainter with every step.
At the top of the final ridge, I stopped to catch my breath and look out. Far below, the surface of the iced lake sparkled like diamonds, with the villas of the magistrates and merchants that rimmed it peering out between the evergreens. On its banks, Geneva was outlined black against the sunset—turreted roofs and spires divided of Vieille Ville divided from the factory by the Rhone, with the clock tower standing in solitary silhouette above it all.